After the Chamber: Lords and Ladies
is a Harry Potter Fan Fic that, like Zero no Tsukaima: Saito the Onmyoji and Code Geass: The Prepared Rebellion, is a mix of Alternate Universe Fic and Rational Fic written by SeerKing.
Harry has just recently defeated the Basilisk dwelling within the chamber along with Riddle's Diary and is reading a book when he is summoned to Gringotts. Upon arrival, he learns from the Goblin leader that he has taken Voldemort's title of Lord Slytherin and invoked the aegis of the Bloodline Legacy Continuation Act on himself in the process. Harry must now be engaged to at least three witches before his seventeenth birthday and then marry them before he turns twenty-one or the Wizengamot will assign him wives. He's not happy about this, but it's become apparent that Harry will never have a normal life...
This work contains examples of:
- Badass Bookworm: Hermione as in canon. Harry is shaping himself to become one because he deeply regrets how just having the right bit of common knowledge would have allowed him to solve the plot of the second book at lot faster and with fewer victims, especially because of everything Ginny had to go through.
- Beware the Nice Ones: To her brothers' horror, Ginny Weasley has a natural aptitude for curses and spells that result in humiliating effects, which they discovered the hard way after Harry taught her several of them.
- Bureaucratically Arranged Marriage: If Harry isn't engaged to three women by his seventeenth birthday, the Wizengamot will assign him brides to their own discretion, which is A Very Bad Thing.Rockclaw: As most of the Wizengamot are of the old, Pureblood families, it is doubtless that some of them are former Voldemort supporters, meaning you will have to be on guard day and night for fear of assassinations, mind control and manipulations.
Harry: So, you're basically telling me that either I choose my wives myself or I'll be marrying a nest of snakes?
Rockclaw: Almost certainly, Mr Potter. - Clear Their Name: One of the few good things that came out of Harry's Lordship status is that it allows him to be treated as an adult in certain legal matters, like testifying under Veritaserum in court. He took advantage of this and of everything The Diary showed him to get Hagrid a fair retrial and exonerate him from Tom Riddle's crimes.Harry: Anyway, do you fancy getting your new wand, Hagrid?
Hagrid: [grins] Been waitin' for this fer fifty years. - Contrived Coincidence: The story's premise. Harry's troubles are the result how two ancient laws interacted in a way no one alive expected to. Actually, if it weren't for the fact that they are magically and automatically enforced, nobody would have ever realized that Harry was legally required to marry several women in the first place.
- Curse Escape Clause: Daphne Greengrass' Bipolar Mind Curse can only be broken if someone falls in love with her, without knowledge of the spell, and loved both personalities equally. Her father bitterly guessed that whoever created the curse was either an utter sadist or hopeless romantic.
- Dead Fic: Hasn't been updated since 2016. Ironically, it was in itself based on a discontinued fic.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: A major source of conflict stems from the sheer difference between Wizarding Culture and Muggle culture, especially considering the fact that Harry is now legally required to perform polygamy in order to provide an heir for each of the three houses he is Lord of. What makes this more egregious is that the law is magically set in stone and cannot be broken or changed.
- Engagement Challenge: To complicate matters, Harry can't just pick anyone to be one of his brides because each of the Houses he's Lord of has its own and often outdated engagement criteria. The Potter Family is both the simplest and most difficult of the three: Harry must be in love with his bride. There are several in the House of Peverell: the witch in question must be magically powerful, at least of an Ancient House, and not to have "unsightly blemishes upon her countenance" (really). The Slytherin House demands Harry's future wife to be Pureblood and a virgin until her wedding night.
- Epic Fail: Draco Malfoy summons a snake to attack Harry, who simply steps aside and asks it to leave. Harry then sends Draco an incredulous/pitying look that just screams "Did you really just try that on the guy you know can speak Parseltongue?"
- Fun with Acronyms:
- Defense Against Dark Arts is often abbreviated as "DADA."
- The Bloodline Legacy Continuation Act or B.L.C.A., i.e. the magical law forcing Harry to be polygamist, is officially nicknamed as the "Blica."
- Hope Spot: Hermione has an "Eureka!" Moment about how the Bloodline Legacy Continuation Act is about preserving bloodlines and Harry's only Lord of the Slytherin House after accidentally earning the title by combat, meaning that the B.L.C.A. shouldn't apply to him and thus no forced polygamous marriage is required. She soon discovers that there's a particular (and seemly unfulfillable at the present) amendment in the B.L.C.A. that treats even nominal heirs of one of the Four Founders of Hogwarts as a special cases and explicitly place them within the purview of the statute. The latter realization felt like a punch in gut for her.
- Ice Queen: Daphne Greengrass is a Justified example due to a curse that took that facet of her personality and magically empowered it to Split Personality levels. She shifts from one to the other at random times only preceded by a distinctive searing headache, but she has to keep the Ice Queen act up even when her normal personality is in control because she wants to keep people at Hogwarts from finding it out.
- Kingmaker Scenario: Depending on their prominence, a noble House earns a number of seats in the Wizengamot — which "acts as both the governing Legislature of the Ministry of Magic and the Highest Judicial Court in Wizarding Britain" — and the representative of the Family gets an equal number of votes in every of the Wizengamot's decisions. Being the Heir of several Houses, plus the extra voting power that several now-extinct Families assigned to Charlus Potter in the eventually of their destruction, Harry will get the right to cast whooping fifteen votes when he comes of age. That many votes in one person's hands could make or break any piece of legislation in the Wizengamot, and thus making Harry a prime target of manipulation and schmoozing for every back-stabbing politician in the country.
- Polyamory: Legally enforced because of the Bloodline Legacy Continuation Act, a magical law designed to keep old wizarding bloodlines from dying out that requires the last male heir of three or more Houses to take multiple wives and pass down each family name to his children with each of them. It's noted that this law has rarely been activated in the last couple of centuries, to the point most people don't know it even exists, but the death of so many wizards during the war with Voldemort increased the probability of happening by several orders of magnitude and, for the better or worse, defeating ridiculous chances is kind of Harry's thing.
- Split-Personality Takeover: Daphne's biggest fear, as her encounter with a Boggart shaped as herself proved. Professor Lupin misinterpreted this as a social anxiety issue, thinking that she's afraid of getting stuck in her Ice Queen act and keeping people at arm's length.
- Weirdness Magnet: Harry. How else can one explain the sheer coincidence with the fic's whole scenario?
- We Used to Be Friends. Hermione is afraid that this could happen between her and Harry. This is because the B.L.C.A. on top of the traditions of the Houses of Peverell and Slytherin require Harry to marry at least two Pureblood witches, making it an effective necessity for him to start hanging out with the elitist crowd in Hogwarts in hopes of finding his future bride(s) there. The problem is that this is exactly the kind of people who often discriminate against Muggleborns like Hermione herself and Harry could be forced to distance himself from her in order to cultivate his new friendships.
- Wizarding School: Hogwarts, as per canon.
